sport. His servants, one and all, from the old, white-haired family
butler down to the little stable-boy, idolised him, but never presumed
to disobey his slightest command. For many years before he came to live
at the mansion, the Hunt had fallen into a state of extreme neglect; the
pack was one of the worst in the kingdom, the subscriptions were
irregular, the kennel servants were ill-paid, the poor cottagers never
received payment for losses when Reynard visited their hen-coops, and
even the farmers began to grumble at needless damage to their hedges,
and to refuse to "walk" the puppies. But the new Master had changed all
this. He bore his share, but no more, of the expense caused by the
reforms he at once introduced, and he reminded his proud yet stingy
neighbours that the pack existed for their sport as much as for his own,
that arrears were shown in his secretary's subscription-books, and that,
unless the funds were augmented, he would reconsider the step he had
taken in accepting the Mastership. Useless servants, useless hounds, and
merely ornamental members of the Hunt, alike disappeared; and with
system and discipline came season after season of prosperity,
contentment, and justice, till it seemed that the best old traditions of
British sport were revived in a community of hard-working, rough-riding
fox-hunters, among the isolated valleys of the west.
As might be inferred from the personality of the Squire, everything was
in apple-pie order on the glorious summer morning when he and his
huntsmen made their way down river to the wood inhabited by Brock. A
complete collection of tools--crowbar, earth-drill, shovels, picks, a
woodman's axe, and a badger-tongs that had been used many years ago to
unearth a badger in a distant county, and ever since had occupied a
corner in the Squire's harness-room--had already been conveyed to the
scene of operations, together with a big basket of provisions and a cask
of beer, it being one of the Squire's axioms that hard work deserved
good hire. Four brawny labourers were also there; and, near by, each in
leash, the three little terriers lay among the bilberries. Punctually at
the time appointed, the work of the day began. A terrier was led to the
main entrance of the "set," but, to the dismay of the huntsman, he
refused to enter. When, however, he was brought to the entrance that
artful Brock had lately used, he at once became keenly excited, dragged
at his leash, and, on being freed, disappeared in the darkness of the
burrow. The Master knelt to listen; and presently, as the sound of
furious growls and barks came from the depths, he arose, saying: "Now,
my men, we may begin with picks and shovels; our badger is at home."
What followed, from that early summer morning till twilight shadows fell
over the woods, and men and dogs, completely beaten, wended their way
homewards along the river-path, may best be told, perhaps, in a bare,
simple narrative of events as they occurred.
When the terrier went "to ground," he crawled down a steep, winding
passage into a hollow, from twelve to fifteen feet below the entrance.
Thence, guided by the scent of a badger, he climbed an equally steep
passage, to a gallery about six feet below the surface. Following the
gallery for a yard or so, he came to a spot where it was joined by a
side passage, and here, as well as in the gallery beyond, the scent was
strong. He chose the side passage, crept down a slight declivity, and
came where Brock's sire had, a few minutes before, been lying asleep,
while his mate and cubs occupied the centre of the chamber. Awakened by
the approach of the terrier, the she-badger and her offspring had
hurried to another chamber of the "set," and the male had retreated to a
blind alley recently excavated back towards the main gallery. The
terrier, keeping to the line he had struck at the sleeping place, found
the male badger at work there, throwing up a barrier between himself and
his pursuing enemy, and at once diverted his attention by feinting an
attack in the rear. For two hours, the game little dog, avoiding each
clumsy charge and yet not giving the badger a moment's peace, remained
close by, while the men cut further and further into the "set," till
they stood in the first deep chamber through which the terrier had
passed. Then the terrier came out to quench his thirst, and was led away
by the huntsman to the river, while the second dog was speedily
despatched to earth, that the badger might be allowed no breathing space
during which he could bury himself beyond the reach of further attack.
The second dog, on coming to the junction of the passage and the
gallery, chose the alternative line of scent in the gallery, and
wandered far away into the chamber where Brock, whose family had
descended some time before to the winter "oven," awaited his coming.
When the faint barking of the second terrier told that the badger had
seemingly shifted his quarters to an almost incredible distance from the
trench, the faces of the Squire and his assistants evinced no little
surprise. For a moment, the men were inclined to believe that the dog
was "marking false," but, presently, their doubts were dispelled, and
their hopes revived, as the sounds indicated that the terrier,
contesting hotly every inch of the way, was retreating towards them
before his enraged enemy. The labourers resumed work, though not with
the confidence of the early morning, when their task seemed lighter than
the experienced Master would admit. Hour after hour they toiled; the
dogs were often changed; and at last the trench was long enough to be
within a yard or so of the spot where the dog was engaged. Then, to the
mortification of the sportsmen, the sounds of the conflict suggested
another change: Brock was retiring leisurely to his chamber. The
earth-drill was soon put into play, and the badger's position
discovered, but directly afterwards the animal again moved, this time to
the deep "oven" below.
Night was now rapidly closing over the woods, and the weary,
disappointed men and dogs reluctantly gave up their task. The Squire
admitted that on this occasion, at any rate, he was fairly and squarely
beaten. Brock and his mate are still in possession of the old burrow
beyond the farm; and Brock's sire, a patriarch among badgers, lives, as
the comrade of another old male, among the boulders of a rugged hillside
a mile from the "set."
THE HEDGEHOG.
I.
A VAGABOND HUNTER.
At the lower end of our village, the valley is joined by a deep ravine
through which a sequestered road--hidden by hawthorn hedges, and crossed
by numerous water-courses where the hillside streams, dropping from
rocks of shale, ripple towards a trout-brook feeding the main
river--winds into the quiet country. The rugged sides of the ravine are
thickly clothed with gorse and brambles, and dotted with hazels,
willows, and oaks. This dense cover is inhabited by large numbers of
rabbits; in a sheltered hollow half-way up the slope a badger has dug
his "set"; and in the pastures above the thickets a fox may be seen
prowling on almost any moonlit night. Past the gorge, the glen opens out
in rich, level pastures and meadows bounded on either side by the
hills. The nearest farmsteads are built high among the sunny dingles
overlooking the glen, and the corn and the root-crops are grown on the
slope beyond the broad belts of gorse and bramble.
In winter, the low-lying lands are seldom visited by the peasantry,
except when the dairymaid drives the cattle to and fro, or the hedger
trims the undergrowth along the ditches. Though the sportsman with gun
and spaniels and the huntsman with horse and hounds are frequently heard
in the thickets, they never visit the "bottom," unless the partridges
fly down from the stubble, or the hare, pursued by the beagles, takes a
straight line from the far side of the glen to a sheep-path leading up
the gorge. And in summer, except when the fisherman wanders by the
brook, and the haymakers are busy in the grass, the glen is an
undisturbed sanctuary, given over to Nature's wildlings, where, in
safety, as far as man is concerned, they tend their hidden young.
In this quiet, windless place, on the day when first the haymakers came
to the meadows, five little hedgehogs were born in a nest among the
roots of a tree, deep in the undergrowth of a tangled hedgerow. The
nest was made of dry grass and leaves, and with an entrance so arranged
amid the "trash," that, when the parent hedgehogs went to or from their
home, they pushed their way through a heap of dead herbage, which,
falling behind them, hid the passage from inquisitive eyes.
It may be asked why such a warm retreat was necessary, inasmuch as the
hedgehog sucklings came into the world in the hottest time of the year.
Nature's reasons were, however, all-sufficient; the little creatures,
feeble and blind, needed a secure hiding place, screened from the
changeful wind of night and from every roving enemy. The haymakers,
moving to and fro amid the swathes, knew nothing of the hedgehogs'
whereabouts; but when the dews of night lay thick on the strewn wild
flowers, the parent "urchins," leaving their helpless charges asleep
within their nest, wondered greatly, while they hunted for snails and
slugs in the ditch, at the quick change that had passed over the silent
field.
For a week or more, the spines sprouting from round projections on the
bodies of the young hedgehogs were colourless and blunt, and so
flexible that they could have offered no defence against the teeth or
the claws of an enemy; while every muscle was so soft and feeble that
not one of the little animals was as yet able to roll itself into the
shape of a ball. The spines, however, served a useful purpose: they kept
the tender skin beneath from being irritated by the chance touch of the
mother hedgehog's obtrusive quills.
Soon the baby hedgehogs' eyes opened wide to the pale light filtering
between the leaves at the entrance to the chamber, and their spines,
gradually stiffening, assumed a dull grey colour. Then, one still, dark
night, the little creatures, with great misgiving, followed their
parents from the nest, and wandered for a short distance beside the
tangled hedge. Presently, made tired and sleepy and hungry by exercise
and fresh air, they were led back to their secret retreat, where, after
being tended for a few moments by their careful mother, they fell
asleep, while their parents searched diligently for food in the dense
grass-clumps left by the harvesters amid the briars and the furze.
Henceforth, every night, they ventured, under their mother's care, to
roam afield, their journeys becoming longer and still longer as their
strength increased, till, familiar with the hedgerow paths, they were
ready and eager to learn the rudiments of such field-craft as concerned
their unpretending lives.
A glorious summer, far brighter than is usual among the rainy hills of
the west, brooded over the countryside. The days were calm and sunny,
but with the coming of evening occasional mists drifted along the
dingles and scattered pearl-drops on the after-math; and the nights were
warm and starlit, filled with the silence of the wilderness, which only
Nature's children break. The "calling season" for the hare had long
since passed, and for the fox it had not yet arrived; so the voices of
the two greatest wanderers on the countryside were not at this time
heard.
A doe hare had made her "form" hardly twenty yards from the hedgehogs'
nest, and night after night, just when the "urchins" moved down the
hedge from the old tree-root, she ambled by on her way to the
clover-field above the heath.
Once, a little before dawn, a fox, coming to drink at the brook,
detected the scent of the hedgehogs near a molehill, followed it to the
litter of leaves by the tree, and caused considerable alarm by making a
vigorous attempt to dig out the nest; but, probably because of the
dampness of the loamy soil, he failed to determine the exact whereabouts
of the hedgehog family; and, after breaking a tooth in his vain efforts
to cut through a tough, close-fibred root, he made his way along the
hedge, and soon disappeared over the crest of the moonlit hill. But the
next night, when the wind blew strong, and the rain pattered loudly on
the leafy trees, he came again to the "urchins'" haunt. The doe hare had
long since rustled by, and the hedgehogs were busy munching a cluster of
earthworms discovered in a heap of refuse not far from the gate, when
Reynard stole over the fence-bank, and sniffed at the nest. Not finding
the family at home, he followed their scent through the ditch, and soon
surprised them. To kill one of the tiny "urchins" was the work of a
moment; then, made eager by the taste of blood, the fox turned on the
mother hedgehog and tried to fix his fangs in the soft flesh beneath the
armour of her spines. But, feeling at once his warm breath, she, with a
quick contraction of the muscles, rolled herself into a prickly ball,
and remained proof against his every artifice. He was a young fox, not
yet learned in the wiles of Nature's feebler folk, and so, when he had
recovered from his astonishment, he pounced on the rigid creature, and,
thoughtlessly exerting all his strength, endeavoured to rend her in
pieces with his powerful jaws. He paid dearly for his temerity. The
prickly ball rolled over, under the pressure of his fore-paws, the sharp
points of the spines entered the bare flesh behind his pads, and as,
almost falling to the ground, he bit savagely to right and left in the
fit of anger which now possessed him, his mouth and nostrils dripped
blood from a dozen irritating wounds. Thoroughly discomfited, he leaped
back into the field, where, sick with pain, he endeavoured to gain
relief by rubbing his muzzle vigorously in the grass and against his
aching limbs. Then, sneezing violently, and with his mouth encrusted
with froth and loam, he bolted from the scene of his unpleasant
adventure, never pausing till he reached his "earth" on the hillside, in
which, hidden from the mocking gaze of other prowlers of the night, he
could leisurely salve his wounds with the moisture of his soft, warm
tongue, and ponder over the lessons of his recent experience.
By far the most intelligent and powerful enemy of the young hedgehogs
was the farmer's dog; but, as he slept in the barn at night, and
generally accompanied the labourers to the upland fields by day, they
escaped, for a while, his unwelcome attentions. Foes hardly less
dreaded, because of their insatiable thirst for blood, were two polecats
living in a hole half-way up the wall of a ruined cottage not far from
the hillside farm-house. The polecats, however, were so occupied with
the care of a family, that, finding young rabbits plentiful in the
burrows on the heath, they seldom wandered into the open fields, till
the little "urchins," ready, at the first sign of danger, to curl
themselves within the proof-armour of their growing spines, were well
able to resist attack.
The hedgehogs were about three months old, and summer, brief and
beautiful, was passing away, when an incident occurred that might have
proved disastrous, though, fortunately, it resulted only in a practical
joke, such as Nature often plays on the children of the wilds. One calm,
dark night, while they were busy in the grass, a brown owl, hunting for
mice, sailed slowly by. Now, the brown owl, in spite of proverbial
wisdom gained during a long life in the dim seclusion of the woods, is
occasionally apt to blunder. Her character, indeed, seems full of quaint
contradictions. As she floats through the moonlight and the shadows of
the beech-aisles of Dollan, she appears to be a large bird, with a
philosophic contentment of mind--an ancient creature that, shunning the
fellow-ships of the garish modern day and loving the leisure and the
solitude of night, dreams of the past. But, beneath its loose feathery
garments, her body, hardly larger than that of a ringdove, is altogether
out of proportion to her long, narrow head and wide-spreading talons.
Visions of the past may come to her, as, blinking at the light of day,
she sits in the hollow of the tree, but at night she is far too
wide-awake to dream. And so great are the owl's powers of sight and
hearing, and so swift is her "stoop" from the sky to the ground, that
the bank-vole has little chance of escape should a single grass-stalk
rustle underfoot when she is hovering near his haunt. Far from being shy
and retiring in her disposition, the brown owl, directly night steals
over the woodlands, is so fearless that probably no animal smaller than
the hare can in safety roam abroad.
As the owl flew slowly past the fence, she heard the faint sound of a
crackling shell--the hedgehogs were feeding on snails. She could barely
distinguish a moving form in a tangle of briars, but its position
discouraged attack; so she flew away and continued to hunt for mice.
Presently, returning to the spot, the owl was once more attracted by the
sound of some creature feeding in the grass; and, detecting a slight
movement beside the briars, she swooped towards the ditch, grasped one
of the "urchins" in her claws, and rose into the air. Her quarry,
feeling the sudden grip of the sharp talons, made a desperate,
convulsive movement, and the owl found, to her astonishment, that her
grasp had shifted, and that she was holding, apparently, a hard bunch of
thorns. Nevertheless, she tightened her grasp; but an unendurable twitch
of pain, as the spines entered her flesh immediately above the scales of
her talons, caused her to drop the hedgehog into the leaf-mould of the
ditch. Immediately afterwards, she herself, eager to find out the cause
of her discomfiture, dropped also to the earth, and, standing beside the
hedgehog, clawed savagely at the motionless creature, seeking some
defenceless point among the bristling spines. At last, her patience
exhausted, the owl gave up the ineffectual assault, and glided away into
the gloomy night. Unhurt, but for a slight wound inflicted when first
the bird descended, the hedgehog crawled back to the brambles, where the
rest of her family were still busy with the snails, and joined them in
their feast.
Autumn's sere leaves had fallen from the trees, and the hedgehogs had
found such a plentiful supply of all kinds of food that they were ready
for their winter sleep, when a gipsy boy, the proud possessor of a
terrier trained for hunting hedgehogs, set forth in haste one evening
from his tent by the wayside above the farm. The boy was smarting from
cruel blows inflicted by his drunken parents, who, after unusual success
in disposing of baskets and clothes-pegs, had spent much of the day's
profit in a carouse at the village inn. Having escaped a continuance of
his parents' brutalities, and eluded their ill-conducted pursuit, the
young gipsy, in the company of his only friend, soon forgot his miseries
as his thoughts turned to a vagabond's rough sport in the stillness of
the harvest night. Thrusting a long stick here and there into the
briars, he strolled along by the fence, till his dog, diligently beating
in line amid the undergrowth, gave a quick yelp of delight, and, an
instant later, a curled-up hedgehog rolled down into the ditch. The boy
placed the animal in his ragged handkerchief, the corners of which he
was proceeding to tie together when the terrier again attracted
attention with unmistakable signs of a "find." For a few brief minutes
sport was keenly exciting, but at last all the "urchin" family, with the
exception of one member, were captured, and the boy, now thoroughly
happy, his pockets and handkerchief heavy with spoil, turned homewards
through the darkness. Next morning, the slain hedgehogs, baked in clay
among the hot ashes of a fire of rotten twigs, formed the principal item
in the gipsies' bill of fare, and the terrier enjoyed the remnants of
the meal.
The hedgehog surviving the gipsy's raid was a young female, that, while
the terrier beat the fence, remained quietly munching a large lob-worm
at the foot of a mound a dozen yards away, and so knew nothing of the
fate of her kindred.
The last weeks of the year passed uneventfully, as far as her little
life was concerned; then, as the nights grew longer and the cold
increased, she set about preparing in earnest for her long, deep sleep.
In a sheltered spot close to the woodlands, where, a month before, a
badger had unearthed a wild bee's nest, she collected a heap of withered
oak-leaves, hay, and moss, and with these simple materials made a large,
snug nest, a winter house so constructed that the rain might trickle
down to the absorbent soil beneath. For a little while, however, she
did not enter into her unbroken rest. Still, nightly, she roamed abroad,
moving in and out of the dried herbage everywhere strewn in her paths
among the tree-roots, till the sapless leaves impaled on the sharp
points of her spines formed such a cluster that she lost all semblance
of a living creature. Insects were becoming rarer and still rarer as the
year drew to its close, and those surviving the frosts retired to
countless secret chambers at the roots of the moss and under the tough
bark of the trees. The lizards sought shelter in warm hollows deep below
the piles of stones left here and there by the labourers, when, every
spring, they cleared the freshening fields. And the big round snails,
the luscious tit-bits of the hedgehog's provender, crept into the holes
of the red mice and into the chinks of walls and banks, where, protected
by their shells, each being fastened to its resting place by a neat rim
of hardened glue, they lived unconscious of decay and gloom. Then the
hedgehog, having become drowsier and still drowsier with privation and
cold, ceased to wander from her nest at dark, and began that slumber
which was to last till the sweet, warm breath of spring awoke her, and
other wildlings of the night, to a life among the early primroses and
violets.
II.
AN EXPERIENCE IN SNAKE-KILLING.
The many changes of winter passed over the countryside; tempests raged,
rain beat down in slanting sheets or enveloped the fields in mist, snow
fell heavily and then vanished before the breath of a westerly breeze,
black frost held the fields for days in an iron clutch, and sometimes,
from late dawn to early dusk, the sun shone clearly in the southern sky.
The sportsman with his spaniels wandered by the hedge, the huntsman with
his beagles chased the hare across the sodden meadows, and the report of
a gun or the note of a horn echoed among the surrounding hills. But in
spite of changing weather and dangers from unresting foes, the hedgehog
slept peacefully within her nest of withered leaves till awakened by
the whisper of the warm south-western wind.
It was a calm day towards the end of March when the hedgehog awoke.
Gradually, since the winter solstice, the shadows of noon, cast from the
wooded slope across the meadows in the glen, had become shorter; and
now, when the sun reached its meridian, its beams fell directly on the
spot where the hedgehog rested among the littered leaves. She felt the
strange and subtle influence of spring, and crawled feebly from her
retreat. The light above her nest was far too brilliant for her eyes,
which had been closed for three long months, and were at best only
accustomed to the gloom of night, so she sought the shadow of a
tree-trunk near, and there, for a while, remained quite motionless. With
the leaves of last autumn still clinging thickly to her spines, she
seemed an oddly fashioned creature belonging to a distant age, a little
Rip Van Winkle of the woods, with a new, quick world of unfamiliar joys
and sorrows claiming her half-conscious life. Extremely feeble from cold
and privation, and knowing, as all Nature's wildlings seem to know,
that sunlight brings with it health and strength, she presently left the
shadow of the tree-trunk, and, closing her eyes, basked in complete
enjoyment of the balmy day. The heat and the gentle wind soon dried her
armour of spines and surcoat of leaves. Stealing in through the tunnel
left open when the hedgehog came forth from her sleep, the wind cleansed
and ventilated the nest, and soon all traces of winter's mustiness had
vanished from both herself and her home. By sundown, the "urchin" had
gained strength that enabled her to wander slowly into the meadow, where
she found sufficient food to stay her growing hunger.
During the first few nights, her appetite, though keen, was easily
satisfied, for the digestive organs, unaccustomed to their work, could
not retain much nutriment, and hours of slumber seemed necessary after
every trifling meal. But gradually her powers were restored, till almost
any kind of fresh animal matter that came in her way was greedily
devoured. A spider sleeping in a folded leaf, a fly hiding beneath a
stone, a snail, a slug, a worm, a frog, a weakling bird fallen from an
early nest, a lizard, or a snake--all alike were welcome as she thrust
her damp, blunt snout, that looked like a little fold of black rubber,
here and there amid the herbage.